Team Ninja is having an incredibly busy year. After releasing Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin back in March, it then formally revealed Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty in June. Not content with that, the developer subsequently announced Rise of the Ronin, an open-world action RPG that, by its own admission, is set to be Team Ninja's biggest game yet. Now, rumors suggest that a Ninja Gaiden reboot is in active development. Ninja Gaiden is an action-adventure series that made its 3D debut in the mid-2000s, following a trilogy of 2D games in the early 90s. It quickly built up a cult following thanks to its unforgiving difficulty, and a reboot is great news for fans of the series.
In a pre-Dark Souls world, the adventures of ninja Ryu Hayabusa in the Ninja Gaiden series were seen by many as the pinnacle of video game difficulty. Fast, frantic combat was combined with a variety of dangerous opponents that really tested the player's skill, and left many gamers scratching their heads. In some cases, they were probably smashing their controllers too. It's now been 10 years without a new mainline entry, but after the trilogy was re-released last year as the Ninja Gaiden Master Collection, a Ninja Gaiden reboot seems overdue.
Ninja Gaiden Has Room to Grow
The original 3D game was lauded when it was released in 2004 for its unprecedented difficulty and a distinct lack of hand-holding which empowered gamers to figure things out for themselves. The enemy variety was vast, and gamers were given a choice of several weapons to use. The maps were fairly claustrophobic, though, often being little more than narrow corridors full of enemies. Taking inspiration from the likes of Onimusha Warlords, the game was a harsh taskmaster, giving players only the simplest of instructions to follow. While word spread about the game's difficulty, and some were put off by this, ultimately the game scored strongly and was seen as a triumph for developer Team Ninja. Its success led to a couple of sequels.
Ninja Gaiden 2 toned down the difficulty slightly as it tried to appeal to a more mainstream audience. With a bigger budget this time around, the game was bigger, with larger maps and more extravagant boss fights. While not scoring quite as high as the first, it was still looked on favorably by critics. The third and final installment, however, almost felt like a step too far. With few new ideas, boss fights were recycled and increased unnecessarily, and areas felt empty and uninspired. There was also an over-reliance on strange QuickTime events that felt out of place. The difficulty spikes were also all over the place, with straightforward encounters quickly followed up with rock-solid ones, and visa-versa.
While many will have fond memories of the series, it was certainly not without its shortcomings. The aforementioned areas could feel awfully small at times, and this made disposing of a room full of enemies sometimes a lot trickier than it should've been. The camera was also a huge issue over the course of the Ninja Gaiden trilogy, as its fixed nature meant that it was sometimes difficult to track Ryu's movements and actions when attacking, as well as sometimes being hit with barrages of attacks from off-screen enemies.
Modern technology can eradicate these issues, and a free-moving camera with large, open areas should be the least fans expect. Ninja Gaiden's strength was always in its raw combat, and there's every reason to believe this would have an even greater level of depth today than it did previously. A new game in the series 10 years after the last would give Team Ninja the opportunity to use all the experience it has garnered since then and create a far better experience all around. The Nioh series has shown just how skilled this development team has become at creating robust, fluid combat systems.
Fans of the series will need to be patient, as Team Ninja isn't exactly sitting on its hands at the moment; if it's working on Ninja Gaiden, then it has a lot of other projects to get out of the way first. However, this ensures there is plenty of time to hone and perfect the game, so that when the time comes for Ryu Hayabusa to make his grand return, he is ready and waiting.
Ninja Gaiden Master Collection is available now for PC, PS4, Switch, and Xbox One.